Shepherds mistake the hermit St. Benedict in his cave for a beast

SUBIACO, about 500 AD — In these years, shepherds on the hills above Subiaco came upon a young hermit living in a cave and at first took him for an animal. He was Saint Benedict of Nursia, and he had been hiding there for three years. After the shepherds found him, he became known across the whole district. Many of the shepherds were converted, and people began coming to the cave to bring him food and hear him speak.

Pope St. Gregory the Great tells the story in the last lines of the first chapter of his life of St. Benedict, the second book of his Dialogues. He wrote it at Rome in 592 AD, some fifty years after St. Benedict’s death. St. Gregory had the story from men who had lived with St. Benedict, and he says so at the start of the book. He could not learn everything St. Benedict did, he writes, and reports only what he had from four of St. Benedict’s disciples. The last he names is St. Honoratus, “who is now Abbot of that monastery in which he first began his holy life,” the house at Subiaco.

As a boy, St. Benedict had been sent to Rome to study. A few years before the shepherds came, he gave up his studies and left his father’s house to serve God. His old nurse would not let him go alone. At Enfide, a mountain town near Subiaco, she broke a sieve she had borrowed from the neighbours and wept over it. St. Benedict took the two pieces away, prayed over them in tears, and brought the sieve back whole. The people of Enfide hung the mended sieve over their church door, and the praise it brought him drove him out of the town. St. Benedict left his nurse in secret, St. Gregory writes, “desiring rather the miseries of the world than the praises of men.”

St. Benedict went on alone into the wild country at Sublacum, as Subiaco was called. For three years he lived there in a narrow cave, and a monk, Saint Romanus, was the only man who knew where he was. St. Romanus brought him bread saved from his own meals.

St. Gregory gives God’s purpose in ending the hiding: God “was determined to ease Romanus of his pains, and to have Benedict’s life for an example known to the world, that such a candle, set upon a candlestick, might shine and give light to the Church of God.”

The first to find St. Benedict was a priest who lived some way off. On Easter Sunday he had his dinner ready when Our Lord appeared to him and said: “Thou hast provided good cheer for thyself, and my servant in such a place is afflicted with hunger.” The priest carried the food he had cooked over steep hills and through valleys and hollows until he found St. Benedict in his cave.

After they had prayed together and talked, the priest said, “Rise up, brother, and let us dine, because today is the feast of Easter.” St. Benedict answered him: “I know that it is Easter with me and a great feast, having found so much favour at God’s hands as this day to enjoy your company.” St. Benedict had lived away from other people for so long that he did not know it was Easter. So the priest told him again that it was the feast of the Resurrection, and they ate together.

The shepherds come next, in a single sentence. St. Gregory writes: “About the same time likewise, certain shepherds found him in that same cave: and at the first, when they espied him through the bushes, and saw his apparel made of skins, they verily thought that it had been some beast: but after they were acquainted with the servant of God, many of them were by his means converted from their beastly life to grace, piety, and devotion.”

In St. Gregory’s Latin the shepherds found St. Benedict in specu latitantem (lying hidden in a cave). They saw him inter fruteta (among the thickets), vestitum pellibus (dressed in skins). St. Gregory gives the shepherds only what they could see, a cave, scrub and skins, and then their conclusion: aliquam bestiam esse crediderunt (they believed it was some beast).

Then the sentence turns on sed (but). Once the shepherds came to know him as Dei famulum (a servant of God), many of them were changed a bestiali mente (from a beastly mind). St. Gregory’s word for the life they gave up, bestiali, comes from his word for the animal they thought they saw, bestiam. The English translation of 1608 keeps the echo, with “some beast” and “their beastly life” in the same sentence.

The chapter’s last sentence tells what came of the shepherds’ discovery. “And thus his name in the country there about became famous,” St. Gregory writes, “and many after this went to visit him, and for corporal meat which they brought him, they carried away spiritual food for their souls.” In St. Gregory’s Latin the visitors brought food for his body and, ab eius ore (from his mouth), carried back the food of life in their hearts.